Ride The Amber Waves
by Kali Cephirot
Summary: Shannon's thoughts about the island, Boone, Sayid, life... [S1 spoilers, written before S2]


**Quick note:** I wrote this before ep 6 "Abandoned" aired, way back when Boone died, so it doesn't fit with many parts. However, I decided to leave this one like this as an 'Alternate Line' kind of thing. I was thinking of Shannon being around twenty four, twenty five years old in this one, not twenty as in the end she was..

**Riding the Amber Waves.**

We weren't always like this, you know? Boone, disappointed. Me, yelling. When our parents introduced us to each other, after the initial jealousy of having my daddy loving another woman and getting another son, Boone and I really were siblings. We fought and we laughed and he protected me from bullies and my best friend got a crush on him and I said her that he wouldn't be interested because he was my brother. Somehow that made sense at the time.

I never really had a family. My father told me that my mom died when I was very little and I never bothered to find if this was true or not. He created this idea that my mother was a wonderful, amazing, perfect woman and I cherished that. I didn't need a mom. My dad gave me everything I could need, even if he traveled a lot. Most of the times he took me with him and by the time I was eight I had been all around the world. Then, he married Sabrina and it was Sabrina the one who traveled with my dad.

Sabrina never tried to be a mother to me. She already had a son and a divorce and she accepted me as part of the deal to be able to marry Alexander Rutherford. She used to call me 'darling' or 'sweetie', never my name, and ignore me most of the time, which was fine with me since I used to do the same. However, I did like having an older brother. My dad once joked that maybe they'd give me a younger sibling and I said I didn't want that, that I only wanted him and Boone and I'd be fine.

Dad died when I was fourteen. He was on an accident and he died because of blood loss, or at least that was what the surgeon, Dr. Shepard, said. Boone held me as I cried. Sabrina didn't shed a tear.

A week after my dad was buried, Sabrina sent me to the first boarding school she found. First it was in Boston, then in Toronto, then in England, trying to get me as far away as she could, I guess: although my father had let me a trust fund, Sabrina was my legal caretaker and now that she was a widower and that she was back to using Carlisle as her last name, she didn't want too have to deal with me. I barely saw Boone and somehow I decided to blame him about everything.

My bulimia started when I was fifteen, during summer break in L.A. I had sex for the first time with one of Boone's best friends when I knew he'd find us at it. I made him break up with every girlfriend I could. I tried to hurt him as much as I could because somewhere in my mind I was sure he had betrayed me along with his mother.

He never said anything about that, you know? He just looked at me with his too blue eyes and then I'd start to cry. He always held me when I broke out and I just hated him for that. Hated him for making me need him, for he was the only light I had, the only one who went to get me and the only one that held me in those long taxi rides in which I was too wasted with sex, alcohol or sometimes even drugs to do anything else than just whimper and cry.

I didn't always know that he was in love with me, okay? I _was_ conceited but not that much, and for me he was only my brother, the only thing, the only person I had left, even if most of the times I wanted to hate him. It was Sabrina who told me that she wasn't going to let me ruin her son's future for I was just like my mother: a slut that had used love to get money. You see, my mother didn't want to have a baby, so my father paid her not to have an abortion. She had been like me, a careless, stupid, drunk socialite teenager that only wanted to use her inheritance and not to have to worry about marriage or family.

That was the day I left for real. I was… nineteen, I think, when I went to live with my then boyfriend (he was from England… I think his name was William… I'm not sure) and a week later we were married on a Las Vegas Chapel and going to Europe for he and his brother wanted to have a band, I think. We split three weeks later, when he was busy with heroin and girls and I was busy with a lovely Italian man with a wife and two kids left at home, of course. My divorce was done without me having to see my ex again, and it wasn't like I had ever used his last name (I can't for the live of me remember what it was). I met Ettienne on a cruise when I was with Giovanni and Ettienne told me that I was 'tres jolie' and that I should go to Paris, where my beauty would be appreciated. He told me I could be a model for an artist he knew. I broke up with Giovanni then and I stayed with Etienne, letting him talk me into going to France.

Two weeks after being in France, I left Etienne for Jean Paul, the artist which he introduced me to, who had a little son who loved animated movies. I was with Jean Paul the longest, but he wasn't doing fine with money. I wasn't really in love with him but I needed the money and I needed not to feel like a wife, since that was what Jean Paul wanted and we both knew that it wasn't going to work for us, so I got in touch with Boone and a week later Jean Paul and I divided twenty five grand and we said goodbye.

I met Bryan after the second guy that Boone had paid to leave me alone, in a beach in Hawaii. You see, I always meet people on my trips because money calls money, I guess. He was from Sidney and he thought I was lovely. We had sex that night and after two weeks of that I was moving in with him on Sidney for five longs months, until he said he was in bankruptcy. I was comfortable with him, you know? I didn't love him but he was nice with me and the sex was good and I was tired, so again I called my brother to save me, only that this time it didn't go like I thought it would.

We've all been pushed too far on occasions, I guess, on days like this in which suddenly the only real thing you have is your not-brother and he was the only one in the world that still loved me. I don't want to use the clichés of the poor rich girl, but Boone was the last person that in spite of everything that had happened loved me, and I remembered: we weren't always like this. In the past we were one and I did love him. I wasn't in love with him like he was and even then I didn't want to believe it, because then he wasn't my brother. He was like all the others. So I kissed him, half hoping he would reject me, half hoping that his kiss would wake me up. I didn't want us to have sex. I hoped it was making love because he was also the only one I did love and maybe I was just confused, right? Maybe I was in love with him only that I didn't know and maybe he would lit me up like amber waves or like the Northern Lights we saw that first Christmas we shared. Boone had whispered that he wished them to keep on shining and I had smiled.

But in the end, I wasn't.

It was a long taxi ride, the one we took to go to the airport. We didn't talk at all. I was trying to put everything behind me. It was later in which he snorted once, saying I smiled too much and I told him to stick it, and for a brief moment we were siblings again and I hadn't royally messed up everything between us like I always did.

Then his eyes clouded with memories and he said that I should wait for a moment. I sat down and I took my magazine out, thinking that the Northern Lights were really far away from this hell and that, maybe, they were still shining and waving.

Sayid made me feel useful for the first time since I was thirteen. I don't know how it is that he has hope. We didn't talk much about his past but for what I knew about it I was surprised he did, but somehow he wanted to share the little shred of hope he had with me. He said once that there's so much more than I let the other ones know. I'm afraid that he saw so much into me because even I try to forget what I am and what I was but he didn't take off everything at once. Somehow I get the feeling that everything with him is this private rite of passage and that maybe I am going to be able to reinvent myself. I thought I could, you know. Get this new life.

But I didn't know that if I got a new life it'd cost my brother's one. Now I realize that the Northern Lights weren't waving. They were drowning and yelling for help and, since I ignored them, they also took my brother's life.

Now I'm alone, lit in amber waves and for everyone else it's just another dead man, just another light missing with no way to get a taxi ride.

Maybe they're right.


End file.
